Washington County Sheriff's detective retires after 20 years of helping solve gruesome crimes

View full sizeTHE OREGONIAN/2005Washington County Sheriff's Detective Sgt. Mike O’Connell is preparing for his retirement next week after 30 years with the department.HILLSBORO -- Police investigators pulled the body of 43-year-old Debbie Cockes from the Tualatin River 12 years ago. Earlier this month, the man who investigated her murder to every exhaustive dead-end asked two younger detectives to revisit one of Washington County's most prominent cold cases.

The death of the Tigard woman still haunts Det. Sgt. Mike O'Connell, 56. After more than 30 years with the Washington County Sheriff's Office -- more than 20 as a detective -- the man who had a hand in solving practically all of the area's most gruesome crimes is retiring from law enforcement Wednesday.

O'Connell was part of the team that investigated serial killer and rapist Cesar Barone in the early 1990s. He interviewed Andrew Gordon several times after the 17-year-old killed Sean Busa during a 2003 burglary. The list goes on.

"He's been an integral part of pretty much any violent crime here in Washington County," said Det. Ray Marcom, a 12-year veteran of the sheriff's office.

"He was the thinker," said retired Det. Larry McKinney, who met O'Connell in high school. "He was the one that would put things together and really put the time to find the little things that really make a case."

O'Connell, whose wife, Aida, works in the Washington County Jail, joined the sheriff's office in 1980. He sports black half-frame glasses, in the style of an era long gone. Toward the end of the work day, the gray strands atop his head seem to be going in as many directions as his mind. Higher-ups are nagging him to clean out his office, and his career's overflow fills two more cubicles, less a filing system than a landfill of manila and cardboard.

Det. Murray Rau says O'Connell can recall a specific file from the middle of a stack. "Mike's one of those people who's completely organized and completely disorganized at the same time," Rau said.

That tornado of paperwork contains the chapters that have brought O'Connell to the end of an unlikely career. In 2005, when he became the supervisor of the violent crimes unit, O'Connell decorated his corner office with a poster of John F. Kennedy and a Franklin D. Roosevelt campaign button. A blue sign, with the white letters "K-E-R" visible, pokes out from behind packing boxes, a vestige of John Kerry's failed 2004 presidential bid.

O'Connell is a "dyed in the wool Democrat" who wears his politics as proudly as he did the golden star of the sheriff's office that rested on his hip. He's been to nearly 30 Bob Dylan concerts and has penned quotes from the singer in staff evaluations. As a student at what is now Southern Oregon University, O'Connell went through a Marxist, anti-police phase.

But the revolutionary in him faded. He prefers to experience uprisings vicariously, through vigorous study of the Civil Rights movement and the Civil War. He describes battles as if he'd witnessed them just moments earlier. While he finds the ideology of the Confederacy deplorable, he is a junkie for its strategy.

Through the prism of the Civil War, O'Connell offers a glimpse of his own philosophy.

At the funeral of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, hundreds of blacks flocked to view his remains. Historians contest the exact reasons, but O'Connell said he suspects it's a sign that Forrest reformed.

"It just shows that bad guys can have a good side to them, too," O'Connell said.

Colleagues said that compassion set O'Connell apart during his career.

"He was as big on proving somebody might be innocent of a certain act," Det. Jerry Stark said.

Although police try to detach from gruesome crimes, O'Connell regularly found himself emotionally linked to cases.

In February 2009, O'Connell visited Washington, D.C., with his daughter. He felt compelled to visit Debbie Cockes' mother, Shirley, who lives in Virginia.

The Cockes case is unique for several reasons. First, and most glaring, is that it remains unsolved. Of Washington County's roughly 30 cold cases, just a handful arose after O'Connell helped launch the inter-agency major crimes team in 1992.

Cockes' ex-husband, Jim Maciariello,was identified as a person of interest in 1998, but he was never charged.

O'Connell doesn't know exactly how he'll spend retirement. There's been talk of coming back to investigate cold cases on a part-time basis. If that happens, he says, he won't revisit Cockes' death. O'Connell knows he has become too intimately involved with it to be objective.

"I think on that one that I have developed blind spots and I've gotten too close to it," he said. "To solve this case, it needs a new perspective."

O'Connell claims he hasn't taken a vacation in five or six years. In April, he will travel to Boston to watch the Red Sox and New York Yankees. He speaks of a later road trip, but the itinerary is undefined

After spending a lifetime in a small corner of Oregon, O'Connell now has the rest of the world to investigate.